Word: malraux
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...most talked-of art critic alive today is France's frail, adventurous André Malraux. When his three-volume Psychology of Art was published in the U.S. in 1949-51, it was welcomed with raves-and a good deal of honest bewilderment. Wrote Critic Edmund Wilson: "It is hard to judge very brilliant books, which may dazzle, deafen and stun when they explode under our noses, but [this is] perhaps one of the really great books of our time." Malraux himself was not so pleased with the book; it suffered from poor organization and a turbulent, over-intricate style...
...book has some of the same faults as the old, but its 661 profusely illustrated pages glitter with sharp insight. Malraux has arranged them in four rambling essays, which cover the entire course of the world's art. The main theme of each essay is hinted by its title...
MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS explores Malraux's thesis that art reproductions present mankind for the first time with a real view of the whole world's art. In reproductions, he writes, "miniatures, frescoes, stained glass, tapestries, Scythian plaques, pictures, Greek vase paintings, 'details' and even statuary . . . have lost their properties as objects; but . . . gained something: the utmost significance as to style that they can possibly acquire...
...queued up the first day. Some well-known intellectuals held conspicuously aloof. Existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir ("We are not that anti-Communist") turned down bids to speak. But plenty of other certified intellectuals accepted, e.g., Britain's Stephen Spender, France's André Malraux, Italy's Ignazio Silone...
There was a variety of good books by experts discussing their chosen fields. Harvard President James Conant's Science and Common Sense was a book that could dispel a lot of fuzziness if it got the reading it deserved. Andre Malraux's The Twilight of the Absolute was loaded with fresh, if intricate, thinking about art. C. W. Ceram's Gods, Graves & Scholars ranged readably over the history of archeology...